The Yali - Part 1 of 2

Posted on Saturday, July 21, 2007 at 08:19

I’m almost done.  A couple more chapters and I’ll finish Don Richardson’s Lords of the Earth (Regal, 1977), the compelling story of sacrifice and redemption in the 1960s jungles of Irian Jaya.  This remarkable narrative of pioneering missionary work among the ferocious Yali people chronicles efforts to reach a brutal stone-age tribe where male domination and female subjugation were all-pervasive, omnipresent, and indisputable. 

Reading this riveting true story, it hit me like a two by four between the eyes: The way demonized cultures treat women.  Like chattel.  No, worse than chattel.  Sub-human.  Worthless.  Useless except as bearers of children and work camels.  The men of these cultures rule with an iron fist, through terror, violence, threats and intimidation, degradation, physical and psychological abuse, and a suffocating, ruthless hostility and hard-heartedness that literally snuffs the lives out of those within their societies unfortunate enough to be born female.

In fact, female suicide in such cultures can be so frequent that it doesn’t merit a second thought.  Always, the “gods” or deity(ies) of these cultures are invariably and solely for the men.  No women allowed.  See this passage from Lords of the Earth (p.139):

 Kopai, a Yali woman, suddenly finds herself and three friends surrounded by warriors from Yabi, an enemy village.  They try to flee but the laughing enemy launches a hail of arrows into their bodies.  Just before Kopai died she lumbers, arrow-heavy into the stone wall of Mobahai, a sacred place.  Any man, friend or foe, would be spared death if he reached a sacred place, where drawing blood was strictly forbidden.  But this sanctuary did not apply to women. 

 Richardson describes what happens next:

 … she did not seek refuge there (at Mobahai).  For the kembu sprits of that place were not her gods.  They were the gods of only half of the Heluk population—the male half.  In fact, the glory of the kembu sprits who haunted that place could increase only to the degree that women were excluded from their presence.  The Kembu’s holy ground, therefore, offered no refuge to Kopai.  For her to enter that holy ground, even to escape death, would only assure her death at the hands of her own relatives.  She preferred to die at the hands of enemies.

 Does that horrify you as much as it does me? 

 The mindset isn’t confined to the jungles of Irian Jaya, either. 

A nut-tree, an ass, and a woman are useless if blows are spared. (Danish, Latin)

Women are deficient in intelligence and religion (Bukhari 2: 6/301; 24/541)

Both a good woman and a bad woman need the stick. (Italian)

Fire, the sea, and woman; these are three ills. (Latin)

From an Amnesty International report (http://web.amnesty.org/actforwomen/gre-120607-action-eng):

     Josephine was brought to Greece after being promised a secure job and a life in Europe. Her “safe passage” to Greece was arranged by people she trusted. She later found out that they were associates of her traffickers. When she arrived in Greece, she was forced to dance in a club and have sex with customers to pay the “debts” to her traffickers. To get her to comply with their demands, her traffickers burned her face with cigarettes and drenched her in scalding and freezing water.

 These aren’t isolated incidents.  Compare the story of Kopai, published in 1977, with these reports from Amnesty International:

 Véronique, captured in November 2002 by an armed opposition group
in western Côte d’Ivoire.

When the rebels arrived in November 2002, they told us they weren’t going to touch us and that they had come to overthrow the government. Some were in military uniform and others wore the outfit of the dozos [traditional hunters]. Some time later, however, they began to enter our houses and take women by force. One day before the end of 2002, five of them came to my house. Two of them raped me and two others raped my younger sister, aged 19. They took me off to Grand Gbapleu, where there were at least 200 rebels.

 Thirty women, including young ones, had been captured by them. … They asked us to do the cooking for them, and in the course of that the other women told of how they were raped, some recounting that they were beaten when they refused to submit.

 "I don’t want to live in Alepe anymore; I’ve left the school I used to go to."
Catherine, a schoolgirl, raped by a member of the government security forces in Abidjan in March 2006.

There are countless more stories like these.  Nauseating in their frequency and scope.  Ghastly, grisly, appalling, heart-wrenching, soul-shattering true stories of women and girls horribly abused, mistreated, starved, oppressed, beaten, tortured, maimed, raped and killed.  Not to say that horrific things don’t happen to males, too, but it’s always bothered me: why is so much hatred and violence so often directed toward and perpetrated against women, daughters of Eve?  This isn’t exactly “dinner conversation.”  It’s not generally discussed in polite circles.  But have you ever wondered (or screamed): “WHY??!!”

 Don Richardson continues:

   Yali religion excluded women from all matters spiritual and sacred.  Yali religion purged all relation to the feminine psyche, which otherwise would soon undermine man’s resolve toward the spirits, thus forfeiting their help and betraying men and women to their doom.

This suppression of female religious instinct, of course had its drawbacks.  For Yali women, deprived of all feelings of religious exaltation and sensing constantly the kembu spirits’ enmity toward them, lived in perpetual psychological depression.  Sanguine personalities were never in evidence among them.  Their suicide rate was 10 times greater than that of Yali men, and many times greater than that of their western Dani counterparts…”  (Lords of the Earth, p. 170)

 Can you even begin to fathom such oppression, such utter helplessness and  desolation?  Lost women, without hope.  Ensnared by the serpent.

Kopai in Irian Jaya.  A woman in Greece.  A woman and a school girl in Côte d’Ivoire.  Four accounts.  Thirty years apart.  And counting.  Do you see the common thread here?  I’m no expert on this subject, but doesn’t this historical hatred of women strike you as… orchestrated?  By whom?  And why?